I love to build things. I love setting goals, figuring out how to reach them and then moving on to the next one. Give me a big idea that seems a little too ambitious, and there is a good chance I will start thinking about how to make it happen.
But the older I get, the more I notice something about achievement. I know a lot of successful people who aren’t fulfilled. They reached the goal. The company grew. They got the title. They made the money. From the outside, everything worked. Yet somewhere along the way, what they achieved didn’t give them whatever they thought it was going to give them.
That has made me ask a different question about my own ambition. I don’t want to stop building or achieving, and I still have some pretty big goals. But how do you build something successful and become more fulfilled in the process instead of less?
A friend of mine who is passionate about his Catholic faith once shared a framework with me that came back to mind as I was thinking about this. It describes business through three ideas: Good Goods. Good Work. Good Wealth. I have been sitting with those words because I think they offer leaders a different way to think about success.
Good Goods asks whether what we create is actually good for people. Most businesses can tell you what they sell, but fewer probably spend enough time asking what happens to people because they sell it. There are plenty of ways to make money by keeping people angry, addicted, insecure, distracted or dependent. Something being profitable doesn’t automatically make it good.
Doing good doesn’t require every entrepreneur to solve one of the world’s biggest problems either. A restaurant can serve people. So can a plumber, barber, accountant, basketball trainer, construction company or software developer. There is dignity in solving an ordinary problem and doing it well. The question is whether what we create genuinely serves somebody.
There is another question underneath that one too: Who are we overlooking? Some markets are easier to serve profitably than others. Communities with less money can get overlooked, and certain customers may never look like the obvious target. Good leadership sometimes requires looking beyond the easiest opportunity and asking whether there are people whose needs have been ignored because serving them isn’t as profitable.
Good Work is about more than creating jobs. It is about what happens to people while they are doing those jobs. Do people have the opportunity to grow? Are they trusted with real responsibility? Can they use their gifts, or do we hire talented people and then control every important decision? Are expectations clear? Are people paid fairly when the business has the ability to do so?
One of the easiest traps for leaders is believing that because we employ people, we are automatically doing something good for them. That isn’t always true. Work can develop people, or it can drain them. Good leadership can help someone discover what they are capable of, while poor leadership can slowly convince that same person that their ideas don’t matter. We can give somebody responsibility without enough authority to do the job and then blame them when they don’t produce the result we wanted.
I have become increasingly convinced that one of the clearest tests of a leader’s values is how they treat people who have less power than they do. Anybody can put values on a wall. Your real values eventually show up in how you respond when an employee disagrees with you, disappoints you, needs something from you or can no longer give you what you need from them.
This is also where artificial intelligence is going to challenge us. We should use technology to become more productive. I don’t believe somebody should spend three hours doing something technology can do well in three minutes just so we can keep them busy. Jobs will change. Some will disappear and new ones will emerge. But there is a difference between eliminating unnecessary work and deciding people are unnecessary. Technology may change the work we need people to do, but it doesn’t change our responsibility to treat people with dignity.
Then there is Good Wealth. I appreciate this part of the framework because it doesn’t ask successful people to apologize for making money. I want entrepreneurs to make money. If you took the risk, signed the loan, missed the sleep, made payroll when things were tight and spent years building something valuable, I hope you get to enjoy some of what you created.
The harder leadership question is what happens when there is more. Who benefits when we win? And maybe an equally important question is who carries the cost of our winning?
Businesses don’t operate in isolation. Employees, customers, investors, suppliers and communities all participate in what we build in different ways. They can benefit from our success, but they can also absorb costs we don’t see because those costs don’t show up on our financial statements. Good Wealth asks us to think about both.
That doesn’t mean giving everything away. It means recognizing that building a successful business puts resources, relationships and influence in our hands, and what we do with those things matters. Employees might build financial security while suppliers grow alongside us. A company can invest in its neighborhood, mentor another entrepreneur or create opportunities for people who haven’t traditionally had access. Sometimes the contribution is even simpler: customers receive something excellent at a fair price. There isn’t one formula, but I increasingly believe a successful business should be able to point to people besides its owners and say, our success helped them succeed too.
Of course, it is easier to write these questions than live them. I have businesses. I employ people. I make decisions involving money. There are relationships where I have more power than the other person. I am still ambitious, and I still want to win. So these aren’t questions I am asking from the sidelines. They are questions I need to ask myself.
Are the things I am creating genuinely serving people? Are people better because they worked with me? Am I giving talented people room to use their gifts? When I have more power in a relationship, how am I using it? When we succeed, who shares in the benefit? Who might be quietly carrying the cost?
Those questions probably belong in more leadership meetings. We spend plenty of time measuring revenue, growth, productivity and market share, and we should. Those numbers tell us whether the business is working. But they cannot tell us whether the business is good.
Every once in a while, a leadership team should sit around the table and ask three different questions: Are we producing Good Goods? Are we creating Good Work? Are we generating Good Wealth?
I don’t think asking those questions makes us less ambitious. I am beginning to believe they might give our ambition somewhere better to go. Achievement by itself is a terrible finish line because there will always be another number, another goal, another opportunity and somebody who built something bigger than you did.
I still want to build. I still want to grow. I still want to accomplish some things that scare me a little when I think about them. But I don’t only want to reach the end and discover that I hit all my goals. I want to know that because I built them, somebody besides me was better off.
Maybe that is where achievement and fulfillment finally meet
